Yearly reminder that github still does not have an IPv6 address (2023)
Try the following:
$ nslookup github.com
[...]
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: github.com
Address: 140.82.121.3
See also the completely ignored post in their forums.
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I've still never used ipv6. It just never offered anything I needed.
If you live in the USA you don't suffer from the problem it solves because you have ~5 IP v4 addresses per capita (totaling to 41% of all the IP v4 addresses), and likewise many european countries have ~2 per capita (although there are expeptions like Italy and Spain which are a bit under 1 per capita). However many other countries don't have such luxury, for example in india there's one for every 36 people, which is obviously not enough and thus they have to either use NAT everywhere or switch to IPv6.
I’m in Indonesia right now. Stuff can be randomly offline or blocked because they think I’ve already accessed or am spamming something. Even little things like New York Times saying “you’ve reached your free limit for today” but I didn’t even have internet access for a couple of days!
There isn't 5 addresses per person in the US. They use NAT like everyone else. I think you know this though.
No the number is public. The IPv4 addresses allocated to the US are about 1.524 Billion, and there are ~332 million people in the US. Most of those IPv4 addresses are allocated to servers in datacenters, but individual people having a public IP for their house is really common. Yeah, your devices are behind NAT, but you can get one. To their point, in countries like India, people outnumber IPv4 addresses so much this isn't possible. Just getting people there online in a way they can interact with the IPv4 Internet is tricky to do well.
They are allocated in levels though, so you can't just get an individual unused address if the top level has been allocated to IBM or Cisco or the DoD. It's not democratic.
Have you tried being less poor?
No
Luckily for me I'm not poor.
Same. I’m hearing it’s a must-have for like 15 years now. It still obviously isn’t a real must-have.
This is because ISPs keep piling on workaround after workaround in order to scale their use of IPv4, which is working but not without some disadvantages. Also, like other commenters mentioned, the western world have an unfair advantage in IPv4 addresses allocation and thus people living there don't really see any meaningful shortage of IPv4. People in other countries don't have this luxury and have to rely on IPv6 and shitty CGNAT in order to stay online.
Depends on where you are. It's a must-have in parts of the world that don't have enough IPv4 addresses.
I remember hearing that it meant every device could have a unique IP. But we still have NAT...
You don't have NATs in the IPv6 world...
You may have.
For example, T-Mobile in many places gives you an IPv6 address and uses CG-NAT for IPv4 — meaning you don’t have your own IPv4, but you do have a few quintillion “real” IPv6’s to yourself.